On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics--the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.

University of Oslo Professor Charles Ess says social robots, such as mechanical dolls, "may well be able to offer good sex on demand." But adds that human virtues need to be cultivated "to avoid becoming identical with the machines that serve us."

A van pulls up in a village street and a ramp extends to the pavement from a side door. A swarm of wheeled robots trundle down the ramp and head off down local streets on missions of their own. Their cargo delivered, they head back up the ramp and the van drives off. This is the vision behind a new collaboration between delivery robot start-up Starship Technologies based in Tallinn, Estonia, and German car maker Mercedes-Benz. Amazon is testing flying drones to deliver packages, but the e-commerce giant faces a raft of regulatory hurdles before its bots take off.

"The future is independent of the past, given the present." Orthography encapsulates a set of conventions for a written language, which includes spellings, punctuation, hyphenation, capitalisation, and other features. For example, in English, we begin a sentence with a capital letter and have spaces between words; each word is spelt in a unique way (most of the times), and we use commas to separate clauses and mark the end of a sentence with a period. Reading about the history of English spelling is fascinating. You probably know Geoffrey Chaucer for his collection of short stories, The Canterbury Tales.

Australia's Macquarie Bank has deployed a new digital banking service, inspired by the data strategies used at the likes of Spotify and Netflix and tapping DataStax Enterprise and the NoSQL database. This includes search-how-you-speak technology; the ability to tag and track transactions; upload receipts and warranties; set saving and spending goals; and automatically categorise spending through machine learning technology. "We looked at the experience consumers receive from popular social media sites, search engines and video and music streaming services, and saw an opportunity to use leading edge technology to bring the same personalised and intuitive experience to banking," says Luis Uguina, Chief Digital Officer for Macquarie's Banking and Financial Services Group, who joined the FI in 2014 from Spain's BBVA. "To do this, we needed a scalable technology platform able to provide real-time value, and working with DataStax Enterprise has enabled us to be more nimble and utilise the most up-to-date technological capabilities available."

In the IT world it is very important to get things exactly right, unless of course you are dealing with fuzzy logic. If your banking system, for example, is out by a decimal place, this can lead to some very unhappy customers or some very happy ones and a less than happy bank. There are many areas where calculations and units of measure are vital, just ask one of the Mars exploration landing teams. Not so obvious are making sure that things like translation services are accurate, as Microsoft found out recently. The Bing search engine saw some very red-faced Redmondites when Saudi Arabian users found that "Daesh" has been translated as "Saudi Arabia". For those not familiar with the term, Daesh is one name for Isis.

I read "When Computers Learn Human Languages, They Also Learn Human Prejudices." The write up makes a point which seems obvious to me and the goslings. Numbers may be neutral in the ivory tower of a mathematician in Minsk or Midland. But in the world of smart software, the human influence may be inescapable like death. Oh, Google will solve death, and I suppose at some point Google will eliminate the human element in its fancy math.

Technology has fundamentally altered our lives and will continue to do so. Ethical considerations must remain guiding posts at all times. Undoubtedly, how we approach the regulation of emerging technologies will have wide implications for our definition of human dignity and the equality of individuals. The Green Working Group Robotics - Jan Philipp Albrecht, Max Andersson, Julia Reda, Michel Reimon and Terry Reintke - would like to invite you to a public hearing on "Merging of man and machine: questions of ethics in dealing with emerging technology". With this and further discussions we would like to develop a position on how society should respond to questions like How will our lives and our society change with the increasing fusion with modern technology?

If you work in any kind of storage facility or warehouse, there's a better chance every day that you're going to be working alongside robots. Magazino's TORU is a good example of the latest generation: navigating by sight, safe around humans, and simple to put to work. Laser rangers let it identify and roll around humans and unexpected obstacles, and there are no big, free arms to whack them with. No special beacons or reflectors are needed to tell the bot where it is, either; it checks its perceived environment against a stored map and deduces its position from that. A set of three TORUs are being delivered to the Fiege Mega Center, a major warehouse in Erfurt; the company's CEO, Jens Fiege, sounds appropriately thrilled in the press release: The robots of Magazino are an exciting project to digitise our warehouses even more.

The Human Choice and Computers conference is taking place in Manchester, UK and exploring themes related to technology and human intimacy. Experts from the fields of psychology, human behavior and technology are gathering to discuss the impact of tech innovations on wider society. When it comes to the emergence of AI (artificial intelligence) and "robot dolls" in particular, it is said that "robot love" could become addictive enough for it to even be able to overtake human-on-human intimacy. The fear of "The Robots Taking Over" has been well documented, and even world renowned scientist Stephen Hawking once said that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," and with any diminishing impact on real human contact, this could literally be the case. In a world where robot technology is able to achieve the same or even better results than a human can, then in the case of robot sex dolls, it could eventually lead to many also deeming amorous encounters with a robot as being better than that with another human being. Robot encounters will certainly require little to no emotional attachments, and no requirement to be rated in terms of ability.